The Duke Was Desperate Without A Translator — Until A Rejected Spinster Spoke 7 Languages

Chapter 25

There is a photograph, if such a thing can be imagined in that county at that time — a description, then, set down by a girl of twelve in a school exercise book, in a paragraph titled A Day I Will Remember, which is the kind of title a schoolmistress assigns when she has run out of ideas and wants to see what her pupils write when they are not being taught:

On the Friday before Easter the whole school went up to the hill over the canal to see the duke’s wife open the new lock. There were a lot of men with ribbons and a man from London read a paper. The duchess read the Portuguese part which was the part that mattered. She read it out loud and the man from London said it was correct. Afterward she gave out slates to the four new girls and told us the school will have a second room in the summer and that Hattie Wren will teach the little ones.

Then she asked us all what we wanted to be and I said I want to be the one who reads the Portuguese and she said then you had better start on Tuesdays.

The cake was very good.

Rosalind read that paragraph four times, sitting at her father’s old desk — the desk they had carried out of the schoolhouse fire, blackened on one side, with a scorch mark in the shape of a leaf near the corner — and then she copied it into the back of the velvet-bound prayer book, where her father’s pencil notes were, and where Wrenmoor’s imperfect French line was, and where there was, still, a great deal of margin left.

She had begun, in the fourth year, to write in the margins herself.

Not grammar. She had all the grammar she needed. She wrote facts: the date the roof was replaced, the name of the carpenter, the number of children in each year, the price of slates in Braewick, the day Mrs. Digby taught a girl of nine to make a proper knot in a thread. The book had started life as a hiding place for a girl’s stolen education and had ended as a ledger.

Her father would have liked that. He had always said that a record kept honestly is a kind of prayer.

“You are writing in it again,” Wrenmoor said.

He had come into the schoolroom — the schoolroom, not the library; they did their work in the schoolroom now, both of them, because Rosalind had declared at some point in the second year that she would not become a woman who ran a school from a different building from the one she worked in — and he was standing with a ledger under his arm, waiting to be told whether it was a good moment.

“I am always writing in it,” she said. “It needs more pages.”

“Then I will have it rebound.”

“You will not. It would fall apart.”

“It is already falling apart.”

“It is holding,” Rosalind said, “which is a different thing. Now sit down and tell me what the commission has done to me this week.”

Wrenmoor sat.

The commission had, this week, proposed to extend the canal north, which meant a second charter and eighty more pages of foreign paper and a Dutch contractor who had sent a schedule that had been copied by hand, and the schedule, on inspection, contained three errors, and one of them was deliberate.

“Do we have the original?” Rosalind asked.

“We have the original.”

“Then I will read it on Tuesday. Hattie will do the Dutch and Cecily will do the accounts.”

“Cecily?”

“Cecily has been doing the accounts for eight months and is better at sums than I am. Do not look like that. It is true, and it is the sort of truth she has never once been told in her life, and if I catch you looking surprised at my sister I will have you put in the canal.”

Wrenmoor looked at the fire and did something with his mouth that was not quite a smile.

“It is a good school,” he said.

“It is a thorough school.”

“It is a good school, Rosalind.”

“It has forty-one children in a room built for twenty, a master who teaches arithmetic with ships, and a duchess who has been known to correct the grammar of a bishop. It is a good school by accident.”

“It is a good school because a woman who was told for twenty-nine years that her mind was a scandal decided to build a room in which nobody would ever be told that.”

Rosalind looked at him.

Four years of marriage, and he still did that — said the true thing in the flat voice of a man reading a clause aloud, and then went back to the ledger as though he had not just put his hand into her chest.

“Your grace,” she said.

“Rosalind.”

“Alaric.” She used his name rarely, and only when she meant it. “I want the margin.”

He looked up.

“What margin?”

“The margin of the county. I want to open a second school. Not in this house — in Braewick, in the town, on the high street, with a door on the street so that any child can walk in without passing a gatekeeper. It will need nine hundred pounds and a building and a person who is not me, because I am going to be fifty years old eventually and I would like the school to be able to outlive my knees.”

Wrenmoor set the ledger down.

“Hattie Wren,” he said.

“Hattie Wren,” Rosalind agreed.

“She is seventeen.”

“She is seventeen and she has read more Portuguese in four years than the entire Board of Trade read in a decade. She will need a partner. I have a name for a partner.”

“Cecily.”

“Cecily does not want to be a schoolmistress. Cecily wants to be a clerk, and there is no reason in the world a school cannot have a clerk instead of a headmistress, and if we are going to build a school with a door on the street, we had better build it with a counting-room, because a school that cannot keep its own accounts is a school that will be closed by a man in a hat.”

Wrenmoor was quiet for a moment.

Then he said: “Nine hundred pounds.”

“Nine hundred pounds.”

“You will need the commission’s backing.”

“I will need the commission’s interest. The north extension will need twelve clerks who can read Dutch and Portuguese and check a hand-copied schedule for deliberate errors. I have four girls who can do it in two years and eight who can do it in four. That is the entire business case, and it is a real one, and if the commission will not fund it then the commission can explain to the next Board of Trade inquiry why it kept no trained reviewers in a county where a forged charter nearly passed.”

Wrenmoor looked at her for a long moment, the way a man looks at an instrument he has decided he will never fully understand and has stopped resenting.

“You have learned,” he said, “to write a very good clause.”

“I had an excellent instructor.”

“Who?”

“A duke,” Rosalind said, “who once told me that he required a partner and then asked me whether I would like the wages first.”

Wrenmoor laughed — the full laugh now, the one she had taught him — and outside the window the light was going and the fire was good and a girl of twelve was running up the lane with a slate under her arm, and the whole of Braewick was going about its business, and somewhere down the road a canal was carrying coal from a place that had once been a lie.